‘Great Vacation Guarantee’ or 110% of your money back!

Following on from my blog last week about Hurtigruten offering their ‘Free Cruise Promise’ it seems they are not the only major cruise line completely confident about the quality of product they offer. Carnival Cruise Lines is renewing its ‘Great Vacation Guarantee’ (apologies for the American terminology!) for a second year. This guarantee provides Carnival guests with the opportunity to receive the following;

A 110% refund, $100 on board credit for a future cruise and complimentary transport home from the ship.

This is available to any guest if they are ‘dissatisfied with their cruise for any reason‘. How’s about that then! We know over recent years Carnival have come in for some bad press following various on board health issues and mechanical failures but i’d say they’d have to be pretty confident in their product to offer something like this. As I mentioned in last weeks blog so often are ‘promises’ and ‘guarantees’ of this nature nothing but marketing slogans, shot down in flames by the small print when it comes to crunch time, but not this one. Carnival have already delivered on this ‘Great Vacation Guarantee’ over the course of the last year.

However, in the year since Carnival originally introduced the guarantee, the line’s 24 ships have carried 4.5 million guests and the guarantee has been invoked only 47 times, a pretty encouraging statistic I think you’ll agree.

So basically if you decide within 24 hours of the start of your cruise that it’s not for you, simply notify Carnival’s on board Guest Services desk and they’ll make the arrangements to refund 110% of your cruise fare, get you off the ship as quickly as possible, and fly you to either your home airport if you flew in, or back to your point of embarkation if you drove to the ship.

Jim Berra, Carnival’s chief marketing officer said;

“You are statistically more likely to date a supermodel than you are to invoke the Great Vacation Guarantee, however, we believe it is important to keep the guarantee in place given its effectiveness in communicating to consumers that we stand behind our product and are extremely confident you will have an exceptional vacation experience when you sail with Carnival.”

So well done Carnival I say, it’s good to see companies actually putting their money where there mouth is for a change.

Bye for now.